3. Nature-searchers.
The discovery of regular processes, of expected effects following upon specified antecedents, of constant properties and qualities in the material around him, has from the earliest recorded times been a chief occupation of Man and has led to the attainment by Man of an extraordinarily complex control of the conditions in which his life is carried on. But it was not until Bruno’s conception of the unity of terrestrial nature with that of the kosmos had commended itself that a deliberate and determined investigation of natural processes, with a view to their more complete apprehension, was instituted. One of the earliest and most active steps in this direction was the foundation, less than 250 years ago, of the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, by a body of students who had organized their conferences and inquiries whilst resident in Oxford.[1]
All over Western Europe such associations or academies for the building up of the New Philosophy (as it was called here) came into existence. It is a fact which is strangely overlooked at the present day, when the assumption is made that the acquirement of a knowledge of Greek grammar is the traditional and immemorial occupation of Oxford students—that until the modern days of the eighteenth century (‘modern’ in the history of Oxford) Greek was less known in Oxford than Hebrew is at present, and that the study of Nature—Nature-knowledge and Nature-control—was the appropriate occupation of her learned men. It is indeed a fact that the very peculiar classical education at present insisted on in Oxford, and imposed by her on the public schools of the country, is a modern innovation, an unintentional and, in a biological sense, ‘morbid’ outgrowth of that ‘Humanism’ to which a familiarity with the dead languages was, but is no longer, the pathway.